Generic Use of the Second Person Pronoun in Danish
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Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20th century spoken Danish Jensen, Torben Juel Published in: Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics DOI: 10.1080/03740460903364128 Publication date: 2009 Document version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (APA): th Jensen, T. J. (2009). Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20 century spoken Danish. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics , 41, 83-115. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740460903364128 Download date: 01. okt.. 2021 Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20th century spoken Danish Torben Juel Jensen LANCHART, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 136, DK 2300 Kbh. S, Denmark [email protected] Abstract In modern Danish, a handful of pronouns may be used to refer to a generic referent. In recent decades, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, apparently in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. Even though generic du may not be as old as the traditional generic pronoun man, it is not a new variant in Danish if we by “new” mean that it has come into existence within the last 30-40 years. To all appearances, it has been used before the influence from English became significant in the last part of the 20th century, and the generic du as such need therefore not be explained by contact with English, as often assumed. In order to study the spread of the generic use of du we analysed the use of pronouns with generic reference in a large sample of speakers, most of whom were recorded during sociolinguistic interviews twice – the first time in the period 1978-1989 and the second time in 2005-07. The speakers come from four locations in Denmark, and three different age cohorts are represented in the study. The results show both a rise and a decline in the use of generic du in the time interval from the 1970s and 1980s till today in accordance with the hypothesis that the increased use of generic du began in Copenhagen and started spreading from Copenhagen to the rest of the country before the time of the old recordings in the 1980s. However, the use of generic du has peaked, or is about to peak, in the Danish speech community seen as a whole, and the developments in the use of generic pronouns should probably be seen within an overall perspective of stable variation. Keywords: generic pronouns, lifespan language change, real and apparent time studies, spatial dynamics, language variation and change Received July 3rd 2008; revised version received September 8th 2008 1. Introduction In Danish, as well as many other languages, the second person singular pronoun may not only be used with specific reference to the addressee (as in example 1 1 below) but also to refer to an undefined person or group of persons in general, that is, with generic reference (as in example 2 below). (1) vil du have lidt mere kaffe1 will you have little more coffee „would you like some more coffee?‟ (2) hvis man ikke bruger kondomet rigtigt så kan du få if one not use the-condom correctly then can you get børn af det men du kan også få aids af det ikke children of it but you can also get aids of it not „if you don‟t use the condom correctly you can get children but you can also get aids, right‟ The general impression, not only in Denmark but also in other European countries (and francophone Canada), seems to be that the generic use of second person pronouns is new, or that it has at least increased significantly in language use in the last decades, possibly as a result of influence from English, where the second person pronoun you has been used with generic meaning for centuries. The use of second person pronouns for generic reference has been described by a number of linguists (e.g. Bolinger 1979; Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990; Blondeau 2001; Berman 2004; Hyman 2004), but quantitative studies of variation and change in the use of second person pronouns versus other pronouns for generic reference have mostly concerned French, the first being Suzanne Laberge‟s famous study of indefinite pronouns in Montreal French (Laberge 1976; Laberge and Sankoff 1980). These studies demonstrate that the use of personal pronouns is indeed a very variable area of grammar as seen from a sociolinguistic perspective, probably, as Coveney (2003) points out, because of their close association with social relationships. It is not clear, however, whether there is actually a change going on with respect to the use of tu and vous as generic pronouns in modern French, and the issue has not, to my knowledge, been subjected to large scale studies in other languages. It has therefore been an obvious choice to include the use of pronouns with generic reference in the LANCHART study of language changes in 20th century Danish (cf. Gregersen‟s introduction to this volume). The design allows us to study the spread of the generic use of the second person singular pronoun du in the Danish speech community in relation to geography as well as gender, social class and age. The study of generic pronouns also includes linguistic factors (reference type and syntactic context) in order to assess functional 1 Unless otherwise specified all the examples in this article are original excerpts from the LANCHART corpus. 2 differences between man and du, which are probably not semantically equivalent in all respects. In addition to addressing the questions whether the use of generic du has increased in the last decades and by whom, this study highlights the more general issues of how to model and explain language variation and change, language change across the lifespan and the relationship between real and apparent time studies of linguistic variables. 2. The variable “pronoun with generic reference” Generic pronouns are traditionally counted as a subtype of the very heterogeneous class of „indefinite pronouns‟, which in addition to items expressing indefinite reference in the narrow sense such as English something, anyone and no one includes mid-scalar quantifiers (e.g. few, several, many), universal quantifiers (e.g. all, every) and identity pronouns/determiners (e.g. other, same) (Haspelmath 1997, 11-13; Dahl 2006). Characteristic of generic pronouns is that their referents are human and generalized: the descriptive reference may include the speaker, the addressee or some specific third party, but it always goes beyond that in an unspecified way (though the context of use often delimits the extension to some degree). The pronoun refers to a generalized person, and what is predicated about this referent is asserted to hold for every instantiation of the type. Using a concept coined by Langacker, the event or situation which the referent of the generic pronoun is predicated to be part of can be said to be “non-actual”: an arbitrary instance with no particular location in time or reality ‟conjured up‟ for purposes of conceiving how the world is supposed to work in general (Langacker 1997, 208). By using a generic pronoun the speaker is instructing the addressee to see the referent from a “structural” point of view: Even though it may in principle be possible to determine the pronouns precise extension, the whole point is that the predication illustrates how the world works in general, not the properties of specific persons or events. Even though Danish has a pronoun which is predominantly used with generic reference – man, historically derived from the noun mand (≈ English man) - the pronouns used for generic reference in Danish are all polysemous having both generic and non-generic variants or uses. This is also the case in other languages such as French and English (cf. Laberge and Sankoff 1980; Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990; Ashby 1992; Steward 1995; Hyman 2004), and from a typological point of view formally distinct generic pronouns are rare in the worlds languages (Haspelmath 1997, 12). It is therefore in many cases more appropriate to work with “pronouns used with generic reference” than with generic pronouns as such, and in a quantitative analysis to count all pronouns in contexts where they are used to refer to an undefined person or group of persons in general. 3 In modern Danish, a handful of pronouns may be used with generic reference, including first person plural vi, third person singular (common gender) den and third person plural de, but except from traditional dialects only the pronouns man, second person singular du and en (derived from the numeral en ≈ English one) occur with any significant frequency. 2 En is primarily used with generic reference in contexts where it functions as the syntactic object (cf. 3 below), in a prepositional phrase (4) or as the possessive in a noun phrase (5). In these contexts en supplements man, as the latter only occurs as syntactic subject. (3) de bad faktisk en om at vaske fingre hele tiden they requested actually one about to wash fingers whole time „in fact they asked you to wash your hands all the time‟ (4) det er nu meget sjovt synes jeg også at stå over for hh it is now very amusing think I also to stand opposite otteogtyve sproglige der der kigger undrende på twenty-eight linguistic who who look wonderingly on en når man laver fysikforsøg for dem one when one makes physics-experiment for them „it‟s rather amusing, I think, to stand in front of twenty-eight modern arts students [high school students] who look at you in wonder when you make an experiment in physics for them‟ (5) hvis ikke man kan diskutere med ens venner jamen if not one can discuss with one’s friends yes-but ved du hvad så er det jo ikke rigtigt vel know you what then is it as-you-know not right is-it „if you can‟t have a discussion with your friends well you know what, it isn‟t right then, is it‟ As the possessive the pronoun en takes the regular genitive form ens (cf.